Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway dumped $400 million of HP stock in under 3 weeks
- Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway made another cut to its HP position this week.
- Buffett's company has now sold more than 12% of its stake for about $400 million this month.
Warren Buffett's company dumped another $120 million worth of HP stock during the first three days of this week, a regulatory filing revealed on Wednesday.
The printer and PC maker's largest shareholder has now sold more than 12% of its position for about $400 million within the past three weeks.
Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway cashed out 4.6 million shares at prices ranging from $25 and $27 in its transactions this week, meaning it collected about $120 million.
The disposals lowered its HP stake to 106 million shares, trimming its ownership to 10.7% — down from 12.3% before it began selling on September 11.
HP stock hit a record intraday high in April 2022 after Berkshire disclosed its position in the computing company, likely because other investors followed Buffett's lead and bought the stock too. It has plunged nearly 40% since then to trade below $26 at Wednesday's close.
The sharp drop in HP stock, coupled with Berkshire's selling spree this month, has nearly halved the value of the conglomerate's stake, from $5 billion at its peak to $2.7 billion.
Hewlett-Packard spun off its enterprise business in 2015, keeping its PC and printer operations under the HP Inc. name. Prior to this month, Berkshire hadn't touched its HP stake since first disclosing the position last spring.
Buffett and his colleagues are yet to offer any explanation for paring their HP wager. They may have soured on the company's prospects, or might be freeing up cash to make other investments. Berkshire has sold a net $33 billion of stocks over the past three quarters, which helped lift its cash pile to a near-record $147 billion last quarter.
It's worth noting the HP disposals are small in the context of Berkshire's roughly $350 billion stock portfolio, and relative to its $1 trillion of assets. One of Buffett's two portfolio managers, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, may well be responsible for the position given its size.